Thursday, November 6, 2008
No cooking these books:Whatch where the vote... I mean money goes.
The Federal Election Commission released the amount of money each news outlet spent on campaign coverage as Fox's Brit Hume reports http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=212323. The drastic slant towards President-elect Obama is hard to ignore. I do not thin we should be ignorant and believe journalists are robotic followers of today's events. They have passions, convictions, and values like normal human beings. What we can see from the money spent to cover each campaign is that there was the media following a trend not following news. In our class we discussed how the media covered Obama more because he was a novelty. A relative newcomer to the political arena, African-American decent, and charming, Mr. Obama caused the media to as Chris Matthews said ' feel shivers up {their}} legs'. Well, when their legs were shaking a lot of loose change feel out, about twice as much as fell out for Senator John McCain. You can account for some the difference because of the run off between Mr. Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton, more pit stops, and because of the Obama campaign charging up to $1500 for media outlets to cover his victory party. I can see more money for that reason , but twice as much. I think CBS really has some explaining to do. Am I overreacting? Is there good reason to spend twice as much on one candidate and not the other? How much was the vote swayed because of this? Shout it out and let me know below in the comments.
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2 comments:
I don't think you are overreacting. We know that media can and does affect the audience's views and plays a large role in the whole political socialization process. I think media has power to sway votes, maybe not the votes of the stark partisans, but definitely the undecided voters. If the undecided voters are mostly seeing/hearing coverage of one candidate, how is this an fair competition? I like what you said about the media following a trend instead of following the news. Yes, I do think it swayed the votes of this election. how much? I don't know. aaaaaarrrrrggghh!
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